thinking about feeling contemporary philosophers on emotions mar 2004

[...]... collection represent a variety of positions on a number of topics: the nature of emotion, the category of emotion, the rationality of emotions, the relationship between an emotion and its expression, the relationship between emotion, motivation, and action, the biological nature versus social construction of emotion, the role of the body in emotion, the extent of freedom and our “control” of emotions, ... empiricist conception of them that was the orthodoxy of his time.10 This conception identifies emotions with feelings as distinct from thoughts They are, in Locke’s words, “internal sensations,” a phrase that nicely reveals the assimilation of emotions to sensations characteristic of traditional British empiricist psychology.11 Consequently, on this traditional psychology, emotions, being pure feelings,... an emotion’s true expressions illuminates the very nature of the emotion Darwin, as I noted, conceived of emotions as analogous to sensations in accordance with traditional British empiricism, and on that con- primitive emotions 17 ception an emotion’s true expressions no more illuminate its nature than swollen gums illuminate the nature of a toothache The Darwinians, however, conceive of emotions differently... emotions The Darwinians recognize minor differences among the emotions too Thus they explain differences among the emotions that belong to the same category—distaste and revulsion, for instance, which are forms of disgust— as reflecting differences in the intensity, duration, and course of the neurophysiological events that constitute these emotions And they explain differences among emotions that belong... explanation of the intentionality of emotions that the Darwinians would find congenial One could, to be sure, revise the explanation again to resolve the problem But one could not do so and still maintain the Darwinians’ conception of emotions And this gets to the heart of the trouble the Darwinians have in trying to accommodate the fact that emotions are intentional states Because they conceive of an emotion... study from expressions that were merely conventional The latter, he 16 emotions, physiology, and intentionality observed, were most likely to be learned in childhood and to vary across cultures For example, as we saw in Romeo and Juliet, biting one’s thumb was an expression of contempt in Shakespeare’s Verona It does not, by contrast, express contempt, at least not conventionally, in contemporary America... definitions of the basic categories of emotions, cannot correctly identify the girls’ emotions in this case Needless to say, it is crucial to this criticism that the expressions on the girls’ faces are true expressions of their emotions in Darwin’s sense They must be true expressions and not conventional, for otherwise nothing in the Darwinians’ theory would require identifying the girls’ emotions as belonging... therefore no less true facial expressions of the emotions characteristic of Beatlemania, when they express those emotions, than they are true facial expressions of anguish and grief, when they express them This conclusion points up a significant confusion in the Darwinians’ theory The source of the confusion is the assumption behind the Darwinians’ division of emotions into basic, general categories according... liable to many of the same emotions Theorists of emotion who take as their leading idea that emotions are intentional states and develop cognivitist theories based on this idea accept the view that comes from Freud, for to make thought essential to emotions is to introduce an element in emotions that can explain how emotions give meaning to the feelings, behavior, and bodily conditions they produce These... operations the emotions in that category consist of, they understand the real distinction between joy, say, and all of its cognate emotions, on the one hand, and sadness and all of its cognate emotions, on the other, to be a distinction between the neurophysiological mechanisms that produce the facial movements defining those categories And the same is true of other major differences they find among the emotions . Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions edited by Robert C. Solomon THINKING ABOUT FEELING Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions edited by Robert C. Solomon 1 2004 1 Oxford New York Auckland. permission of Oxford University Press India. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thinking about feeling : contemporary philosophers on emotions / edited by Robert C. Solomon. p Desire and Emotions 135 Michael Stocker Part V: Emotions, Action, and Freedom 10. Emotion and Action 151 Jon Elster 11. Emotions and Freedom 163 Jerome Neu Part VI: Emotion and Value 12. Emotions as